9 Simple Ways To Improve Your Weekly Golf Practice Schedule

When it comes to your golf practice, you are confused. It sure would be nice to have a great weekly golf practice schedule that allows you to monitor what works for you and what does not work for you.

Let’s get right to it. Here are the nine easy ways to improve your weekly golf practice schedule…

1. Determine your golf goals

You can create all of the practice plans or weekly golf practice schedules that you want to create. However, if you do not know what you want to accomplish with your playing skills, it will be difficult.

Obviously, if you are playing only once a month, your goals are going to be different than someone trying to play for a living. Either way you should have goals and a golf practice schedule to insure you are on the right path.

If you are not sure what you want to accomplish playing golf or need help setting your golf goals, we have written another post to help you do that… click here to read.

2. Set Your Weekly Golf Practice Schedule

Now that you have determined your golfing goals, you can now set your weekly golf practice schedule.

You will need to determine how much time you will create to devote to bettering your skills. Does this look like one practice day a week, three days a week or more for you?

When it comes to discussing goals with a player on the practice tee, many times the goals are simply unrealistic for the amount of time they have to devout to the game. This is ok… but… we need to be reasonable or realistic.

Setting small goals that are attainable are important to setting confidence and determining future success.

3. What To Work On In Your Practice Sessions

Most players think they have a good idea of what they need to work on to improve their scores. However, when it comes time for their lessons they end up thinking they need to work on their driver.

If you are currently taking golf instruction, you teacher/coach should be giving you a plan to work on in the time between your sessions. If not, you should ask them how they prefer you to practice until your next session.

You shoudl have been keeping stats on your game. If not, you should take the time to gather some data on the golf course. I would suggest you keeping more of the strokes gained type of statistics as opposed to the traditional green hit in regulation or number of putts per round.

Even if you have only one hour, you should spend time on the three main areas of the game, full swing, short game and putting. So how do you break up your time?

4. Learning A Motor Skill

Although most of what you watch or read promises huge improvements in one session after watching their video or reading their article. Although it sounds great that is just not how it works.
Learning how to swing a golf club is like learning any other motor skill, like walking. Watching a child learning how to walk is a lot like how your learning how to play golf will happen. It does not happen all at once.

One day, the little one will take two steps forward and then fall down. They will get up and try it again. This time making it six steps before falling down. In the third attempt, they may only make it two steps again.

Like your golf game, learning to walk for the child is not linear. This simply means that the next attempt does not insure that they will take at least one more step than the time before.

In golf, just because you shoot a certain score one day does not mean that you will shoot a better score in your next round. The idea is to get your scores trending downward.

5. How To Break Up The Time In Your Practice Session

My players have had long term success with breaking up their practice int thirds. With needing to work on full swing, chipping/pitching and putting, it makes sense to break your time into thirds.

If you have three hours a week to practice, you may want to name each session and work on full swing for one hour on Day 1, chipping/pitching for an hour on Day 2 and Putting for an hour on Day 3.

If you only have one hour a week to practice then you would have 20 minutes for full swing, 20 minutes for chipping/pitching and 20 minutes for putting.

6. Set Up Your Practice Station

Often, I see players come to the driving range or the practice green without a plan and just make a few swings or stroke a few putts.

If you plan to work on your full swing, take a minute to think about how you can best set up your hitting station. What would you need to make it comfortable for your session? Depending on the time of year, this can sometimes be difficult, haha.

With that being said, do you need to properly set up some alignment rods? Do you need to set up training aid(s) to help you? What is going to get you focused? Do you have water with you to stay hydrated?

7. Block Practice Vs. Random Practice

Most players when they come to me do not know the difference between block practice and random practice. Both of these types of practice are important to playing better golf.

To gain a full understanding of what block practice and random practice is… read a past article that we have written… Click here to read

The dime tour would tell you that block practice is basically doing the same thing over and over.

For example, taking a basket of practice balls and after warming up hitting the rest of the basket with a seven iron, to the same target with the same swing thought, this is block practice.

Random practice would consist of changing variables. This makes it more like playing real golf. For example, you could use a seven iron but swing it towards different targets.

Another example would have you “playing” a hole while on the range. Visualize a hole that you want to play. What would you take off of the tee? Swing that club. Visualize where you would be after that shot and pull the club that you would use from there.

My favorite is to take a three wood, six iron and a pitching wedge. Start with any one of the three clubs and after making a swing you cannot hit the same golf club twice in a row. In addition, to do use the same pattern of clubs. Meaning, do not go three wood, six iron, pitching wedge over and over and over.

8. Find Your Challenge Point

How I use this with my students is to set an imaginary fairway on the driving range. Depending on their skill level, I will set the width with the goal that they can hit seven out of ten in the fairway.

The player hits the ten drives. If the player can hit eight or more drives in to the made up fairway, we make the fairway smaller the next time we do the exercise. If they can only hit the fairway six or less times out of ten, then we will make the fairway larger the next time we do the exercise.

The goal is to find your “Challenge Point” where the exercise is nit to difficult fo the player nor too easy. This would fall on seven successes.

You can take this theory and challenge yourself in many other ways as well. Get creative.

9. Keep Notes From Your Practice Session

As you make your way through your weekly golf practice schedule, make notes that will be helpful for you in the future. Some things that you may want to denote include in your notes are how you are feeling, what thoughts or feels are working or not working for you as well as what you learned from your session.

At the beginning of the practice session, first, review what you did in your last session.

Keeping a proper golf journal will allow you to monitor your self-talk. While playing and practicing golf, you must be your own best caddie. If a real caddie talked to themselves the way that you talk to yourself… would you hire you as a caddie?

At the end of your session, denote the good and bad about what happened but also set a plan or goals for your next session.

If you find yourself needing help with setting up your weekly golf practice schedule in order to develop a golf practice routine to break 100, a golf practice routine to break 90 or a golf practice routine to break 80… Look into the benefits of The Ball Flight Academy online membership. Click here.

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